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Mozilla To Ditch Firefox Extensions?
An anonymous reader writes "Although some have raised concerns about how sane switching to Jetpack is, it seems that Mozilla's new gadget is bound to replace the powerful extension mechanism we know. Maybe Mozilla wants to replace all the great add-ons we use daily with gadgets that add an entry to the Tools menu, or maybe they just want to draw thousands of inexperienced developers into putting together a bunch of HTML and CSS that won't integrate in the UI. It seems to me that in light of recent decisions we've discussed before, Mozilla isn't going in the right direction. What do you think ?"
Seriously. Provide a link to the main stori(es) and that's about it. All this extra stuff is simply extraneous. How can we RTFA if we don't know which is the real frikken article?
Removing extensions from Firefox is like removing the guns from a tank.
I never did think Mozilla was headed in the right direction. I've long shunned their browsers because, to me, they were bloatware, overly complex and bug-prone and not even offering the features I'd come to love in the competition.
But that didn't prevent Mozilla from making a very successful browser.
So, if now I say that I don't think they are headed in the right direction, what does that really tell anyone? Obviously, their success depends on other things than what I think about it. I wish them all the best, I hope they'll enjoy working on their products, and we'll see how they pan out in practice.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
It's rabblerousing. Slashdot, news for the hard of thinking.
Editors, please try to give these stories at least a pretense of fairness. Unless you need this for your application to work at Fox News.
It's supposed to be completely automatic, but actually you have to press this button.
OMG programming is HARD! We need to reduce features and make it simpler so any moron can do it!!!
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
Or may be they are going in the right direction. If companies such as google, litl webbook and projects such as bespin are thinking along the lines of creating a GUI/web platform its possible that their's a new direction that computing is headed. One where older heads like us may not necessarily think to go.There are many parallels in computing (PC, Minicomputer, Internet) Not saying the above is so (I find the above net GUI idea restrictive), it just pays to think about possibilities, such as a more robust GUI without the need for adding complex libraries.
...or maybe they just want to draw thousands of inexperienced developers into putting together a bunch of HTML and CSS that won't integrate in the UI...
And this is different than the current system how? Sure, there are TONS of great add-ons/plug-ins/whatever-they-are-called for FF, but honestly, the entry bar is pretty low, and for as many great ones there are, there are two crappy pieces of shit.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
I think that if you want to spread FUD you should make sure that you don't link to a web page that makes this statement in the second paragraph Mr. Billmer.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
...or maybe they just want to draw thousands of inexperienced developers into putting together a bunch of HTML and CSS that won't integrate in the UI...
Just change the scripting engine to PHP... IT'S A JOKE...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Extensions and the customization they provide is THE reason I use Firefox. If they are so foolish as to eliminate this capability, they're going to lose a lot of users. If this happens, I won't upgrade for as long as I can, and when I'm eventually forced to switch, I'll find a browser that supports allowing me to customize it. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the OSS community forks the project over this.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Right now, it looks like AdBlock, Flashblock, CustomizeGoogle, and my own AdRater couldn't be implemented under JetPack. The Jetpack API documentation has a section "Content - Methods for interacting with web pages. That's the mechanism anything that deals with ads needs. That leads to "Page modifications", which leads to This documentation is under development. Please see the page modifications API proposal for now."
That leads to Jetpack Extension Proposal #17 - Page Mods, which discusses how to implement Greasemonkey-like functionality using Jetpack. Current status is "Implementing (since May 27, 2009)".
So the functionality needed for AdBlock, etc. is vaporware. It's not even clear that, if implemented, the proposed mechanism would support AdBlock. The author of Adblock Plus wrote last month "Jetpack has to support Adblock Plus, not the other way around. As it is now, Jetpack isn't suitable for complicated extensions."
It's significant that Mozilla gave priority to implementing "themes" and such, which are needed for vendor-branded browsers, while putting off implementation of user-oriented features like ad blocking. Is this a back-door effort to get ad-blocking out of Firefox?
Chrome extensions are entirely HTML/CSS/JavaScript, and so are many Chrome pages (the New Tab Page, the Downloads Tab, etc). I'd tag this badsummary, because it's not the idea of Jetpack that's the problem here, it's the implementation. From the first article, which is the only one that seems to be seriously concerned:
I like its power, I dislike its syntax. I _really_ dislike its syntax.... images are inline as data URLs because Jetpacks misses offline support and packaging; the HTML element inserted into the statusbar has to be precisely positioned and that will suck depending on the preferred user's font size;
Contrast to Chrome's extension API, which is fairly clean where it isn't strictly what's already available to any webpage. In particular, those two issues are addressed: Chrome extensions are packaged (more or less) as a cryptographically signed zipfile, so you can have separate images, scripts, etc; there are currently very well-defined ways to add a button either to the URL bar or to the browser itself, and when toolstrips were available (I don't think they are anymore), they were exposed as HTML pages with most of the work done for you in predefined CSS, so no absolute positioning (at least not that you have to do yourself).
integration with native or native-alike (hear xul) UI and cross-platform issues, a major concern
Basically, the article seems to be assuming there are (and will always be) advantages to XUL. To me, the answer to this is not to expose XUL, but to fix/extend the HTML used. In a way, I think Chrome proves that users really don't care that much about the UI looking and feeling "native", but care much more about it being themable.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Without Firefox folks doing something about these leaks, I will continue to bash their otherwise good product.
Heck, leaving Firefox running overnight on Windows XP means a reboot for the computer since it becomes unusable after Firefox has consumed megabytes of memory! This is insane.
May be the upcoming 4.x release series will have all the goodies one can be proud of. Time will tell.
"Integrating with the UI"? So whatever happen to XUL
I actually sometimes find myself preferring Safari for actual web-browsing... especially for Slashdot! Firefox seems to slow down when loading long discussion pages, whereas Safari is quite fast. But extensions are Firefox's killer feature. AdBlock Plus, but also Zotero (citation management, only available for Firefox), Greasemonkey + DownloadThemAll... without the extensions, there's little that would make me prefer Firefox to Safari.
"Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
When Firefox was first released, it was a breath of fresh air -- a fast, effective browser that discarded the bloat which plagued Seamonkey.
Firefox laid the groundwork that has brought us to the current state of browsers... there's a competitive market, except in the business space, where the inability to manage browser settings has made the enterprise the last refuge for Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, the project doesn't have the desire to expand its impact further -- they refuse to accept bug reports or feature requests regarding issues that are critical to business users, and shout you down when you try to complain.
So you have this great browser, but you can't script the install, can't manage update distribution (ie. autoupdate is not appropriate in many use cases), and manage config in a sane way.
Now instead of fixing those issues, they are "fixing" something that isn't broken -- the extension system that makes Firefox so cool for so many people!
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I have never liked the Firefox design, and I have never trusted the XPI installer mechanism. Switching to an extension mechanism that doesn't open up the whole performance and security bag of worms the Firefox extensions do would be worth trying.
How many dependencies on servers having uptime, and being secure? Imagine a world of plug-ins that rerference each other so heavily that a cat on a certain keyboard could crash everyones extensions.
"Dr. Schroedinger, the veterinarian is on line one. He said something about your cat, but then my computer locked up."
John
Because that is the only point over using any other browser out there.
Firefox is not exactly fast or lightweight, you know. And without extensions it can’t hold a candle to Opera.
If extensions are going to get replaced, it will be by something that is so equal in what it offers, that it most likely still will be called extensions.
If they really kill their reason of existence off, I’ll switch over to Opera in the blink of an eye. The Opera guys never disappointed me, and always were pioneers.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
For me , personally, virtually every change since FF2.0 has been for the worse; the gui has gotten harder to use, simple things i need are hidden, extensions are constantly breaking....
What has surprised me is that a group of devs hasn't forked to keep FF2 and all that was great in it, and try to add things that are really neat: how about a powerful business contacts manager, a la windows BCM, that is native in side FF
How about video that actually works ? (vlc has never worked well for me)
how about serious privacy (its clear 'they" are getting new tricks faster then ff can stop them)
how about a decent calendar - the thunderbird type calendars suck .....
instead we get all sorts of useless tinkering with the gui..
Have anything to back this up, or are you just talking out of your ass?
There's this new thing called The Google. It works really well. You just type something like "Gates.Foundation drug patents" and it lets you start to find out things for yourself. In this case, the first few links will lead you to find out about UNTIAID. Basically, the story goes like this. During the 1990s, developing nations (especially India and Brazil) began to amass the manufacturing capability and expertise to produce advanced pharmaceuticals for minute fractions of the wholesale cost of those drugs on the world marketplace, the price being set by the IP holders in Western countries who enjoyed the political access necessary to keep extending patent lifetimes and extensions almost indefinitely. At the start of the Noughties, a crisis was looming when several companies, mainly Indian, began retailing vast quantities of anti-HIV/malaria/TB drugs to poorer countries (mostly African) at costs way below what Western companies were prepared to sell at. For a while it looked as if literally half the world was ready to secede from the international patent system in an effort to provide medication for as many of their sick populations as possible. After several rounds of negotiation, within which the Gates and Clinton foundations were major players, a compromise was established. Rich Western countries, NGOs, and foundations made it clear that their aid money was contingent on poorer countries recognising Western patents and refusing to buy from "rogue" companies or countries. In return, their access to grant/loan/development monies was assured, and several cartels and exchanges established whereby these countries could purchase Western patent-protected medications or the right to produce such medications at "below market" costs (but still literally several times the cost of producing such medications outside the patent system). UNITAID is one of these exchanges. The Gates foundation is one of the major players in UNITAID, and its lobbying recently has concentrated on maintaining relatively high remuneration fees to the Western IP holders, thereby maintaining relatively high costs for the drugs. For the poorer countries, it's a classic Faustian bargain: they get grant money, but they have to spend much of this money buying higher-priced drugs. Given the public-private partnerships and funding/tax arrangements, it's a classic example of corporate welfare where grant money nominally allocated to developing countries is funnelled back to Western IP holders, either as actual cash or as tax deferments.
Da Blog
Mozilla's UI team has a ten year history of cluelessly grandiose blunders - so if it seems like they're doing the wrong thing, they probably are.
Look, to be honest, I don't use FireFox because it is awesome, although it is pretty awesome. I use FireFox because it has AdBlock, which is the killer app for websites. Without AdBlock, the internet becomes immediately useless, with too much noise-to-signal. Other browsers have less compelling ad-blocking extensions; not compelling enough to use. My opinion of this "JetPack" thing will rise or fall with the success of AdBlock.
the people are still getting the drugs they need
Many hundreds millions of people are getting necessary drugs. But many hundreds of millions are not. Transporting drugs at cartel prices from developed nations or even manufacturing them under licence has the effect, still, of restricting access to those drugs for poorer at literally orders of magnitude less cost, and also retarding the development of manufacturing and research industries within developing countries dedicated to producing their own drugs at fractional cost. Sometimes "aid" has the effect of eliminating development, a pattern we've seen again and again enacted in post-colonial economic systems.
grant money freely given to them
Grant money given along with conditions that it be spent within certain cartels with pricing set not by market forces but by manufacturers' lobbies is not "money freely given". Especially because the manufacturers get a double benefit: sales proceeds and tax credits because of their "charity" in selling their drugs "below cost" (that is, below the high cost they claimed they could seel these drugs for, whereas in reality their sales at these prices in developing countries would have been close to zero).
As for "mass murderer", well, that wa snot my choice of phrase. It's a matter of perspective. In a couple of hundred years, when people are writing the history of late capitalism, they will add up the death toll, the literally billions of people who were allowed to die over a century or so because of the need to maintain the IP cartel system. Whether they will call that "mass murder" or "acceptable outcomes" depends on what economic system occupies the greatest mindshare in the most historians, and how out contingent, transient stage of late capitalism is viewed by them.
In an analogous system, think of the hundreds of millions who perished because of slavery, that is, the labor-intensive practices of early capitalism designed to produce agricultural commodities within monocultures at low cost. At the time, even though many agitated against it, the slavery system was regarded for generations as a necessary evil. With time, as the utilisation of fossil fuels and the employment of non-slaved masses within the system industrialisation replaced slave labor, the slave system lost mindshare. It began to be seen not as something desirable and even ordained by God, but as an unnecessary evil. For the most part, its economic output was replaced by in-situ colonialism, a system whereby the laboring masses were forcibly employed within the borders of coutnries rather than being transported en masse to remote destinations. In time, that economic system also lost relevance and was supplanted by more efficient modes of production and consumption.
Regimes change. Until it had developed sufficiently and established its own R&D and scientific regimes, the USA was one of the world's largest "pirate" nations. Right up until the start of the 20th century it was notorious for ignoring and refusing to recognise the IP and copyright systems of the "established" economic empires, allowing its industries to "steal" what they needed to ramp up their manufacturing. The more expensive products from the empires rarely had much chance of succeeding in the USA, unless they either sold at radically low cost or sub-contracted out their manufacturer at very unfavourable terms to native USA companies. Now that the USA has a huge stake in the current economic system, it effectively erects barriers to entry that prevent other emerging economies from doing what it itself did to emerge from backwater underdevelopment and a permanent existence as a low-margin commodities producer.
Da Blog
The reason I'm using Firefox is the because the extensions are so much better than on any other browser. AdBlock, FlashBlock, DownloadStatusbar, RefControl, NoScript. You can half-ass these on other browsers like Chrome or Opera, and I've done it, but in the end the ease and simplicity of it wins out, especially when I have to explain to other people how to do it and the first thing you do on a new machine is install a decent browser and extensions. I do not want to have to locate the profile directory and hand edit or copy things on every machine, much less have to explain to my parents how to do this.
If you cripple this to the level of Opera UserJS, which is fairly powerful but also a pain in the butt, then I have no reason not to move to Opera or Chrome.
Now if they can somehow make this transition while preserving the addon manager functionality and allowing actual browser extensions like DownloadStatusbar or TabMixPlus to work, then I'm fine with that. It's the results that count, not how it's implemented.
I can tell you that as far as I know, there are no plans to scrap the current extension system. The plan is to provide an easier way of developing extensions, that will be powerful enough for the vast majority of extensions, and easy enough to allow a far greater amount of people to take part in the process.
I believe much of this confusion could be alleviated if everyone concerned watched this video http://www.vimeo.com/8372101 (a talk on the topic by Aza Raskin, head of UX at Mozilla) - and for those who can't be bothered with it all, you can skip to 35:10 or read this rough transcript:
"The rough plan for where we're going with this, is that by Firefox 3.7, this will be baked into Firefox in some degree, so that's end of Q2. [snip] And by Firefox 4 we're really going to be pushing for making Jetpack or Jetpack enabled extensions the premier way of writing extensions, and while I don't think we're ever going to phase out the old model entirely [...] we're going to be pushing that almost everything happens inside of this." -- Aza Raskin
-- cers / Christian Sonne